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EP 294 – National Social Media Day

June 30th is a National Social Media Day. It’s important because of the fact that everything is all based on marketing these days. If you’re going to be successful at something, it all starts with marketing. You could have the greatest product you, the greatest idea, but if you don’t know how to market or how to use marketing to move that product and get the word out with whatever product, service, event, or whatever it is you have, you’re failing. National Social Media Day has been around for a while. There have been cities that have been celebrating it years. Scott discusses the upcoming National Social Media Day and what’s in store with a 27-hour live stream the day of the event on Saturday, June 30th.

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National Social Media Day

I hope you guys are having a great week rocking and rolling along here. I know we’ve been extremely busy here since I got back from the cruise and finally feeling a little bit normal. My sleeping habits are back to normal and we’re getting caught up in all the work and stuff like that. I wanted to talk a little bit more here on the podcast about something that’s coming up. June 30th is National Social Media Day.

Why am I talking about that when this is a note podcast? It’s important because of the fact that everything is in marketing these days. Everything is all based on marketing, whether you like it or not. It is what it is. If you’re going to be successful at something, you have to realize it all starts with marketing. You could have the greatest product you, you could have the greatest idea, but if you don’t know how to market or how to use marketing to move that product or get the word out in whatever your product or service or event or whatever it is, you’re failing. We’re excited to be a part of this. It’s been around for a while. There have been cities that have been celebrating Social Media Day for years.

I started in Seattle a few years back. Our good friend, Kristie Whites, knows better about the history of that. Kristie Whites went to the city of Austin and was able to get the mayor to declare June 30th as National Social Media Day. We were excited to be a part of that inaugural event as one of the speakers, as also one of the sponsors for the event. It was a great live stream event from the offices of digital marketer here in Austin. It was about 80,000 views on the live stream. We’ve got some great feedback from people, some great people opting into things and starting to follow us along. I got a few new students because of that.

The best thing about it was just getting the word out on what’s going on and there are so many things that people are doing online these days through their social media, through their marketing to drive business. I was excited when I started thinking about what we wanted to do with the next evolution because Kristie and Elijah were the main driving force behind that. I got with Kristie and said, “Let’s do something. Let’s make it bigger and better.”

I get this greatest inspiration watching House of Cards. If you remember in House of Cards, there’s the episode where the young governor is running against the President in the election. The governor decides to host a 24-hour live stream Q & A session. Just a pure Q & A session. They’ve taking questions, talking to people. I’m like, “How cool would that be to do something like that for an event? I could do that for note investing.” That’s a little bit tough what about something more generic. Then I thought, “It’s National Social Media Day.” I immediately called Kristie. She liked the idea. We throw it on the calendar because it’s National Social Media Day now versus National Social Media Day in Austin. There are cities celebrating all across the country, like the National Social Media Day in LA and Istanbul and Greece and all these other areas they are celebrating it.

National Social Media Day: If you’re going to be successful at something, you have to realize it all starts with marketing.

We decided, “Let’s do this from midnight on the East Coast since it’s National Social Media Day, midnight, New York time, which is 11:00 AM central and run that all the way through midnight on Pacific Coast.” Now we didn’t want to go all the way to Alaska. We don’t want to go all the way to Hawaii, that’s a little bit craziness, but we decided we’ll do 27 hours from the mainland. We kick off at midnight June, midnight Eastern Standard Time on Saturday morning, early butt crack of dawn or more of the witching hour. Kick it off there and run it all day long. 27 hours, guest speakers. Roughly, we’re breaking it down. We’ll have 54 spots of either stuff we’re going to fill in with intros and outros, live streaming all through Facebook and seeing if we can hit half a million views if not more so, especially with some of the guests that we’ll have on there. We’re reaching out to some to finalize some of the things.

We did reach out to Gary Vaynerchuk and his team. He is having a family reunion that weekend. He was already an expensive speaker, his $100,000 price tag roughly to speak, to show up on a webinar or speak for an hour, it was a little outside our budget for the thing. We’re going to do some cool stuff on it. We’re bringing in people from all across the country, social media experts, platform experts, vendors. People who are doing great stuff. We’re excited about that. We’re two weeks out. We haven’t marketed that much. It does make sense to think ahead of time. Most people do stuff in the final two weeks plus I was on vacation and Kristie has been busy as well. She’s been doing great stuff as well and looking forward to catching up with them. I thought it’s important enough to dedicate this episode of the Note Closers Show to National Social Media Day because there are a lot of people doing things.

Do Something To Celebrate It

The premise of it is at least doing something to celebrate it. It’s not Fourth of July. I know it’s a week out or four days away from Fourth of July when National Social Media Day. I know it’s a Saturday. I know people like to sleep in. Last time we ran it from roughly 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM or 6:00 PM or maybe it was 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM and there is a big part of digital marketing headquarters. It was great. I got Kristie and Elijah convinced that we don’t need to have that much overhead. We can do this much more efficient and effective for the cost of some good internet for a few hours. We’re pretty stoked about that. I’m absolutely excited about what’s going on with that. I would love to hear some of the things that you would love for us to cover because we’re finalizing the schedule.

National Social Media Day: If you’re not doing things on a regular basis to your audience, you are getting steamrolled by the competition.

It’s going to be a mixture of guest speakers. It can be a mixture of some content as well, effective tools, tricks, things that we are using. Things that we see people are using, our guests are using on a regular basis to share their big things that they’re winning on. Their big actions, whether it’s Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, or podcasts. There’s a whole variety of different things that we are excited to just be seen and can’t wait to share out there. National Social Media Day, it’s what we’re talking about here.

We’ve got some spots available if a few people who are interested in speaking, who are social media experts. If you’ve got 100 people on your following, that’s not an expertise, but we do have a few spots. You just put it out there. We’ll have a few spots available for things, but otherwise, 27 hours straight. June 30th from 12:00 AM East Coast to 12:00 AM Pacific Coast time. It’s going to be a 27-hour live stream to knock it out of the park and share some great information. I’ll give you a little bit of rundown.

I was very fortunate enough to have somebody mentor me a little bit for a few years while I was working with some people that I originally learned about business, from a guy named Roland Frasier, who’s now one of the big principals over at DigitalMarketer. He does an amazing job, amazing marketer, amazing individual. One of the brightest and smartest people in the world when it comes to marketing and getting things done. I was fortunate to learn a lot from him and I’ve also learned a lot on my own by going out and knocking out of the park.

Literally failing forward, embracing that I was going to suck on things at first and it’s led over the last thirteen years to where we’re at today. I’m one of the experts in my space. I would say one of the key most experts. I know we do a great job of marketing in the note space than anybody else does, probably in the real estate community more than anybody else does. The thing to keep in mind is that we have had plenty of time to work through and hone our craft and get better at what we do on a regular basis.

What I would like to do with this episode, we want you to go to National Social Media Day. We want you to go there and check out the Facebook page. We’ve got a website up. I’m stoked at some of my friends who are going to be on there. We’ve got some social media experts who are going to be there. Sebastian Rusk from Miami has talked about being a part of this in the past. There is the Facebook page, Facebook.com/NationalSocialMediaDay, for you guys to take a look at it as well. Check it out, get into it, follow it because we’ll be live streaming directly from that page in two weeks. One important things to me is, what are you struggling with? I know you’ve got an Instagram account.

I know you get a Facebook account or I know you’ve got a MailChimp or Infusionsoft or CRM tool to help you drive traffic or to help you market. What are the things that you struggle with? Is it just using it? Scheduling it? Is it what do I say? What do I post? How often do I post? What’s the best platform for what I’m doing, whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter? What I’m trying to get at is the fact that there are so many opportunities, so many ways, people are using Snapchat. I don’t use Snapchat. It doesn’t work well for what I’m doing right now. Instagram, great visual. Great on the video side, especially since Facebook purchased it.

They got some new changes coming around. Getting more and more used to using that as well with the stories and things that are available with that. What are the things that you guys are struggling with out there in your marketing? What are you struggling with? Is it just not posting? Is it not being a priority? What is it everybody? What’s the issue? What are you struggling with when it comes to your marketing? Is it how to put everybody into a funnel system for you? How to associate your leads the best, as far as where they come from and how to reach out to them. Is it your listening versus listening to too many people versus acting?

Focus On Getting Stuff Out

One of the things that I had to do is shut down some of the online stuff that I was watching on a daily basis. I love Gary Vaynerchuk and other people listen to him on a daily basis. They listen to Grant Cardone. I had to remove those from my feed. Now I’m not the biggest fan of Grant Cardone. He’s got some good stuff, but I also think he blows it out of the water a little bit. That’s just my personal opinion. A little over the top, but I had to turn it off because I had to focus on getting my stuff out. I had to focus on taking the time and using that half hour that I was spending on it.

Not that wasting on it but spending that time on that trip to go out there and use that hour to promote my own stuff, whether it was starting the Facebook Lives. How that evolved into the podcast. What are the things that you’re struggling with? Is it the fact that you see something on social media being negative? Especially with being so politically driven or bashing politics, whether which side of the coin you fall on. The left or the right and there’s not really that much in the middle anymore. Make the people in the middle and just don’t say anything.

National Social Media Day: As long as you’re sharing on a consistent basis, people will start looking for it.

One of the great things that we have seen from people is that they are sharing articles for the most part. I got my buddy, Brian Ellis out of Atlanta, who for years has been sending a blog out or an email out with interesting articles. Basically, it’s an email. It gets out with four different articles in it and he put a paragraph is coming on each one with a link directly back to the article. Adam Adams our good buddy AJA Investments out of Dallas. Slow down a little bit of his books, but when he started originally doing was posting articles a day to his Facebook page.

One in the morning, one in the afternoon and he would get that off of DS News, get out of it on Housing Wire. It’s hard to tell. I know I’m speaking to Laura right now and anybody else out there too. It’s hard to tell with all of Facebook’s algorithms what we are seeing and what we aren’t seeing. I know that some pages slow down. You don’t see as many pages and stuff like that on what you post and how you interact with people.

That’s one of the great things you can use using DS News, Housing Wire, Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily IBD. Those websites that provide articles that are interesting enough and sharing that to your page. Now, you also have done a great job recently talking about some of the deals you worked on. You just got two deals modified the other day. You could go in and share content on each asset. Here’s an asset in this area. You don’t get what you paid for but talk about the fact that we got a reperforming, they’re making 140% payment off the original payment.

Doing some great stuff like that. That would be good. Photos of the property, I see many people in real estate, they talk about deals. I get it under contract. You put a picture of the map where you at. Seven or eight assets but there are no photos of the assets. There are no photos of the properties. People want to see photo. That’s why Instagram has done so well over the years. Everybody’s got a short-term mindset, very short-term mindset when it comes to what they’re looking at. How fast you want to ingest that content. It takes longer than eight seconds to make a touch base with them or going grab their attention. You’ve missed them. They got swallowed by the goldfish.

National Social Media Day: People want to see photo. Everybody’s got a short-term mindset when it comes to what they’re looking at.

This is what I would recommend, Josh. I hear that all the time from a lot of note investors. I hear that from a lot of people and I want to separate. I want to have content for my investors and asset managers and not just from a real look. Throw them all in the same. You have probably your targeted list of asset managers for banks and you probably don’t want to put them on your regular email, but most of them are going to be on your Facebook page anyway. Your asset managers, you only need to reach out to them about once, maybe twice a month. It doesn’t have to be anything, this is what we’re looking for this month. This is what we’re looking to do. With your investors, I would send out all of your investors inlaid with your traditional real estate investors.

Real estate investor community, because they’re all associated together, you don’t need to segregate investors from real estate community. Just lump them all in together and talk about the deals you’re working on, the deals that you and your data are closing on. Same stuff that you would do. Like what I mentioned with Laura, taking the articles that are available online and even just sharing, “Did you read this industry article about interest rates going up and how it’s going to affect housing?” or “This article on Seattle or Portland,” or wherever. Those are the most important things that you do and it’s just sharing. It doesn’t have to be every hour on the hour, but at least trying to hit once a day, across different platforms because people interact differently on different platforms. You need to be posting on Facebook and you have the Facebook groups. You can also do targeted stuff.

Build Consistency

You just do stuff on a regular basis. One of the great things that is going to happen is you have to build consistency. That’s one of the most difficult things that people struggle with. I see this from other people. “What do I share on a regular basis?” Just share what’s going on. If you’re looking at assets, share that, you’re breaking down and tape it. Here’s a picture of an asset or two. Pictures are worth a thousand words. There also worth a thousand views a lot of times. Anytime you post a decent quality photo or video, you’re going to get more views than just posting something in text. We as Homo sapiens, we got two eyes, are a fickle bunch and if it doesn’t attract their eyes, it’s probably have not made sense.

Make Your Life A Documentary

That’s why you see more and more images of people being catchy versus just white out. Somebody can put a picture of a house up with a person in front of it or a girl in front of it or guy in front of it or whatever. You’re going to get more hits. It works that way. You also have a lot of stuff coming in and you’re overwhelmed. “What do I say? What do I use? What don’t I use? Your audience is different from my audience.” There’s some crossover. Our tribes will intermingle with things, but there are people that will be attracted to what you say better than if I say it. You have to realize you have interesting things to say. We’re all going through different things. We’re all doing different deals. We’re all experiencing and as my good buddy Brett Berkey just mentioned here, we all live in our own documentary. Make your life a documentary. People love to see the process and behind the scenes, the real deal stuff.

I’ll give you an example. I was flipping through and there was an article in USA Today about Christina Aguilera posing for Paper, the magazine, with no makeup on. He uses a lot of makeup posed took a photo shoot with no makeup on. It’s selling off the hockey. People are reading it and they’re downloading it and clicking on and all that stuff because it’s real life. It’s real stuff. You don’t have to be Christina Aguilera to appreciate that. A lot of people are. We have a celebrity like that in the front of your paper, but you all have to realize this. If you’re in business today doing anything online, you run your own media company, you run your own marketing company, you are responsible for putting out content to get your word out. If you’re not posting stuff on a regular basis, if you’re not doing things on a regular basis to your audience, doing stuff online, you are getting steamrolled by the competition.

Talk About Case Studies

Somebody is going to fill in and take that crumbs because we’re all buying for crumbs. We’re not the Time Warner, we’re not the AT&T, we’re not the Horizons, we’re not the Fox News, we’re not the MSNBC, the CNN. We’re not those things. We’re not the HBO, The Showtimes. You’re not that stuff but more and more people these days are looking for a real world. That’s why reality TV has done so well. That’s why you have Facebook investing billions of dollars to all these live streams, Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Red Now, investing millions and billions of dollars into their native shows, their own live stream. You get on to their channels to drive people to them as their new audience, expanding audience.

That’s one of the things to keep up. Brett of Paperstack, you guys buy a lot of assets. You guys are shooting yourself in the foot by not talking about the case studies. I know that you, Rick, and TJ have a big passion for helping people. Talk about the case studies. Talk about what you’re doing with those investors, those borrower. Talk about how you’re helping that borrower out. Episodes from The Note Camp is on iTunes on The Note Camp podcast. Our Note Camp podcast, I just want to run 6,000 downloads, which is crazy for it being a onetime event over four days. I’ll take the 6,000 downloads.

Christina Fuller here, sharing something. “On my way to a little meeting with a fellow note investor here in town and someone brand new to it. Listening on the way.

One of the great things that I will be doing, Christina, you’ll probably going to do this is taking a picture of you guys there, the three of you, the four of you or whoever in the group and post, tagging people in it, sharing it across your platforms, leveraging other people’s audiences that may have something in common with you. I would love it. It’s one of the things that you see so many people out there on Facebook Lives and podcasts and things like that. Saying, share this. They want to get the word out and if you have not shared this, please feel free to do so.

Sharing this across your platform, especially with something that you enjoy, drives people. It adds value to your platform and also it adds value to mine because you shared it, thank you so much for sharing. That’s value. Doing it on a regular basis and that’s what it comes down to. More than anything else. When you’re delivering content or you’re trying to drive a message home or expand your audience or just share what you’re trying to share. It’s all about consistency. I learned that pretty much over less than a year and a half. We had a really good system set up here. Where their social media team, had to let her go.

I’ve been reading most of social media in the last four or five months. Doing well for the most part, but when you take time off, like we went to Hawaii for a week and then we took three weeks off to go to Europe just recently. Someone stuff dropped off. That’s why I was very causing traffic and things like that. Especially on the podcast. That’s why I did not want to drop the ball or the last three weeks. That’s why I took it upon myself and like, let me take my ego out of it and we get some other people on here to help carry the torch to make some things happen.

National Social Media Day: You just do stuff on a regular basis. One of the great things that is going to happen is you have to build consistency.

I was excited that the eight people did a great job to be a part of it. They may have had technical issues. It’s going to happen. You’re going to have issues on anything that you do on a regular basis. You’re just going to get better at it. Sometimes the episodes get shared, sometimes it didn’t. I was okay with that. As long as the episode got recorded, that was the most important thing because over half of them got live stream, which is great. All them got recorded, which is great. I can upload those videos to YouTube and Vimeo. I can then also take them and those could be episodes that people don’t get on Facebook. They’ll have to go then straight to iTunes to watch those.

Do Guest Hosting Or Throw A Surprise

There’s some great opportunity across the board when you have a little bit of a guest host or you throw a surprise, and this is why you see sometimes companies giving over their social media pages for hours or days sometime to guest experts or celebrities or other people to drive traffic their way to make things happen. I was watching something, a documentary on Netflix about child stars, stuff like that. They talked about the Olsen twins. It was a Full House thing or something like that and talking about the twins. They talk about how they don’t have social media profiles.

The only time they’d been prevalent on social media is when they took over the social media page for a day or something like that. They posted some photos there and it just blew up because there’s a scarcity aspect of what they do. You’ll do things that you’d be in scarcity or you’re going to be in abundance. It’s better being abundant. Scarcity is great if you’ve already had the notoriety. You’ve got a name for yourself. You are your own celebrity. What I’m trying to get at is as long as you’re sharing on a consistent basis, people will start looking for it.

I was amazed at the amount of emails and messages I got when I got back. People are like, “We missed you. Great job with everybody and your guests but we missed you.” I guess my personality helps out with that. I’m not everybody’s favorite cup of tea or a cup of coffee. Some people get upset and that’s fine. You don’t have to listen to me. I won’t take offense. We don’t have to be friends. I don’t need this thing. I don’t need to be friends with everybody. Sometimes when you bring on other people or like Laura says, substitute teachers did a good job. You learn more with a different voice or different face.

Gail Greenberg did a great job. Gail’s down in Birmingham, drawn by assets, talking with borrowers, stuff like that, which is great. I want to share different stories along the way. That’s why we did great with Patty, Bill, Gail, Gail, Eric, Chris and Katie. We got our commercial architecture Chris Seveney, he did great stuff, commercial investments and big projects. Bill Griesmer, a physical therapist, and an avid bicyclist. Katie Moton, retired school teacher and spouse to a military guy. Gail Greenberg, done some writing, done interviewing in the past. That’s a brace up there, but also very passionate heart for what she’s done.

Eric Hyde, current police officer. Have been shot once or twice and doing some great stuff. You’ve got Patty Ped who’s international over here doing some great things and still working full time. Gail Villanueva, ex rocket scientists and realtor, stuff like that. Cody Cox joined us one time. He was very active still as a mortgage banker in Oregon, but doing some great stuff. I love that their different personalities and different backgrounds add value to wherever they’re going. I think that’s the most thing. You see a lot of people, especially on shows that they’re very hesitant to just bring on people. I was hesitant to just let anybody come on.

That’s why I reached out to these eight people and said, “Are you’re interested to be on?” They all said yes. It’d be to somewhere a little bit of limited, which is totally fine. We try to make it work and I was glad we got all eight of them on for at least one episode. That’s the thing you got to think about. What are you doing? What is your message? How consistently are you sharing? How are you sharing across the board? I had a great conversation with my buddy Ryan Harper from Propelio out of Dallas talking about online marketing. They did an online event or an event in Dallas. 700 plus RSVPs, 400 plus showed up. Free networking event. We were talking about it and they do daily Facebook live streams with their different speakers.

National Social Media Day: You’re going to have issues on anything that you do on a regular basis. You’re just going to get better at it.

I’ve been on there before, but how they drove most of that, their audience came mostly from Facebook versus emails. They’ve got 4400 I think people that follow them on their Facebook page, which is great. It’s a huge win for them compared to other real estate software or other companies that use Facebook or use a few last years. They don’t market directly for events, they still use the emails or the direct mail aspect or radio, but that’s not always the most effective aspect of things. You got to realize that whether you like it or not, the world is evolving.

That’s my biggest drive here in two weeks with National Social Media Day is trying to help you all evolve. Helping you all take those next steps, whether it’s one step at a time. I look at what George Crocker did originally when he was getting rocking and rolling about doing a video where he film, printed out a piece of paper and film that from a chair talking about my case study, which is great. He did something. You got to get back to that, George, if you want to get to where you want to be eventually.

Do Updates And Live Streaming Events

If you guys could do me one huge favor, what I would ask for all of you to do is go in and check out National Social Media Day, the Facebook page, clicking on it to like it, click on it to follow. There are a lot of opportunity for you guys to learn. You don’t have to join us for the full 27 hours. We’re excited about it and we want to help you guys. I thank all of you guys. I know there are more people out there. What are the things that you’re struggling with your marketing that you need help with, besides sharing content? What are the things? Are you scared to be in front of the camera? Are you scared that you don’t want to be the focal point? Guys and gals, thank you for listening. Thank you for watching as always. We’re excited. National Social Media Day kicks out June 30th at midnight East Coast and will run until midnight Pacific Coast time in that day. Check us out, National Social Media Day at Facebook.com/NationalSocialMediaDay.

Christina, thank you for sharing. She says, “Getting out my email and video, not my strong point book.”

I get this and I hear that same thing from everybody, Christina. I’ll get my email. You have to schedule it. I’m sure you have a schedule that you followed by. If you’ve got to make an appointment somewhere, you put it in your appointment book and you go. What everybody needs to do, if they’re having struggles about getting an email out, it’s making an appointment themselves. Literally put it in time block, you schedule to write your email and get it out. Just do it. Putting it in your schedule. There’s no excuse for it. That’s the easiest thing that you can do. Maybe an hour appointment with yourself every Saturday or Sunday or Friday, whatever the low times for everything else, but make an appointment with yourself to get it out.

Video not my strong point. Video is never anybody’s strong point until they actually start doing it. #embracethesuck everybody. One of the most important things you can realize is you’re going to suck at it until you do it. You’re not going to hit 100% until you’ve done it for a month or so four or five times. Embrace the suck, get it out, get it scheduled, and just do it. Trust me, do a little video from where you’re at today in appointment. It doesn’t have to be long. It can be two minutes long. I challenge you to do that. Do Facebook Live from your phone. It’s not difficult. You don’t have to use high technology. Facebook Live, here’s what we’re talking about, video your live online, here’s what we’re doing here.

It could be a 30-second to one-minute review of what you discussed and what you went over for your meeting. Some of the easiest ways to get started. What I started doing was those daily Facebook Lives to challenge myself to be on camera every day, communicate with my tribe, get the content down. Some of those were eight minutes long. Some are short, some are an hour long depending on the day. That’s what it evolved into The Note Closer’s Show podcast. Go out there, be a trooper, get it done, just do it and trust me. The more times you fail, the faster you’ll find success. With that, we’ll see you at the top. Have a great day.